Middle East|Grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini Is Excluded From Election Panel

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Grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini Is Excluded From Election Panel

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Hassan Khomeini has been disqualified from running for a seat in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical council that will be elected on Feb. 26, his son said in a post on Instagram. The assembly would choose the country’s next supreme leader if the current one, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dies or steps down.CreditCreditVahid Salemi/Associated Press

TEHRAN — A grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been barred from helping to choose the next one, according to a family member’s posts on Instagram.

The grandson, Hassan Khomeini, is a Shiite Muslim cleric of a lower rank than his famous grandfather and is associated with the reformist faction in Iran. He has apparently been disqualified from running for a seat in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical council that will be elected on Feb. 26. The assembly would choose the country’s next supreme leader if the current one, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 76, dies or steps down.

To run in any Iranian election, a candidate must first be approved by a 12-member committee called the Guardian Council. That council announced on Tuesday that it had vetted 801 would-be candidates for the Assembly of Experts and had approved 166 of them to run. It did not specify who had been disqualified from running for the 88-member panel.

No official figures were available for the council’s decisions on candidates for the parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for the same day. But reformist leaders said last week that almost all of their candidates for Parliament had been disqualified.

That has been the pattern since 2000, when reformists won a majority in Parliament, leading to an extended period of political infighting with hard-liners and conservatives. Few reformist candidates have been permitted to run in elections since then.

Reformists have been promoting Mr. Khomeini, who is 43, as a figurehead of their faction in recent years, and his apparent disqualification is a significant setback. He will have to wait at least seven years before trying again for a seat in the assembly.

Reformists say that Mr. Khomeini and his family are popular, noting that their social media accounts have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. They say his grandfather was a defender of democracy and call for a return to his values.

Mr. Khomeini’s disqualification was reported online by his son, Ahmad Khomeini, who is 19. The younger Mr. Khomeini complained on Instagram that the Guardian Council had “failed to prove” that his father was unqualified, and had refused to “accept the testimonies of tens of top clerics and Islamic jurisprudents in support of his qualification.”

Ahmad Khomeini also wrote, without elaborating, that the reason for his father’s disqualification was “clear for all.”

The 166 approved candidates include President Hassan Rouhani and a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Both are regarded as moderates and have been accused by hard-liners of being too close to the reformists. The hard-liners say the reformists are scheming to introduce “American Islam” in Iran, a false version of their faith.

Mr. Rouhani has spoken out against the large number of disqualifications, but his spokesman, Mohammad Bagher Nowbakht, asserted on Tuesday that Mr. Rouhani had not criticized the Guardian Council, according to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency. “He has had unofficial meetings with disqualified candidates, and of course, hopes for justice,” Mr. Nowbakht said.

One reformist analyst, Farshad Ghorbanpour, said that though Mr. Khomeini had been excluded, the decision to allow Mr. Rouhani and Mr. Rafsanjani to run was a success. “Now we can start building coalitions in the assembly,” Mr. Ghorbanpour said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grandson of Khomeini Is Excluded From Election. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe